Archive for the Huh? WTF? Category

If you don’t have a US passport you might want to get one now before a proposed new application form is adopted. This is particularly true if you don’t have a copy of your long form Birth Certificate. According to this story, many of the questions are almost impossible to answer.

The U.S. Department of State is proposing a new Biographical Questionnaire for some passport applicants: The proposed new Form DS-5513 asks for all addresses since birth; lifetime employment history including employers’ and supervisors names, addresses, and telephone numbers; personal details of all siblings; mother’s address one year prior to your birth; any “religious ceremony” around the time of birth; and a variety of other information. According to the proposed form, “failure to provide the information requested may result in … the denial of your U.S. passport application.”

The State Department estimated that the average respondent would be able to compile all this information in just 45 minutes, which is obviously absurd given the amount of research that is likely to be required to even attempt to complete the form.

It seems likely that only some, not all, applicants will be required to fill out the new questionnaire, but no criteria have been made public for determining who will be subjected to these additional new written interrogatories. So if the passport examiner wants to deny your application, all they will have to do is give you the impossible new form to complete.

This form is a bureaucrat’s dream come true – Kafka’sCatch-22. With the stroke of a pen some government drone who may be having a bad day has the power to deny your passport.

You’re probably thinking, “How could they possibly know any of this – I’ll just make up a bunch of stuff.” That’s true, but that’s also the beauty of it. They don’t have to know any of it. If they deny your application, the onus is on you to prove it.

Detroit, home of the “Big 3” US auto manufacturers (2 of which are on government life support), is the epitome of failed government social policies. Mired in political corruption (more here and here), with an abysmal school system (more here) and fleeing population, the city has become an economic and industrial wasteland (more here and here). While mayor Dave Bing deserves some credit for at least trying to turn things around, others in the city government believe that Detroit deserves a taxpayer bailout (story here from the Detroit News). Huh? WTF?

Councilwoman JoAnn Watson is reiterating her call for a government bailout of Detroit, saying the city that built the middle class deserves as much help as Wall Street or General Motors.Addressing the City Council today during Mayor Dave Bing’s budget presentation, Watson gave a spirited pitch for federal funds to help the city whose population declined 25 percent since 2000 to 713,777.

“We are worth it. We are worth at least as much as General Motors or Chrysler or the Wall Street bankers,” Watson said. “It was this city that built military vehicles for World War II. It was this city that (invented) the middle class and the five-day work week.

“We should not be in a position to be victims. We are victors. And we should demand respect.”

General Motors received $52 billion in government aid, while Chrysler received $12.5 billion, according to published reports. Mayor Dave Bing has traveled to Washington, D.C., repeatedly seeking more federal funds for Detroit.

Watson has floated the idea for years. The liberal magazine the Nation named Watson one of its 14 MVPs in 2009 for promoting a “multifacted Detroit Marshall Plan to revitalize her economically battered city.”

In the past, Watson has said the city deserves at least $1 billion.

Declared a “Model City” by the LBJ administration in the 1960’s, Detroit has received hundreds of millions in taxpayer funding. And now Detroit demands “respect.” How sad…

Alec Baldwin was in Washington for Arts Advocacy Day to lobby congress against cutting funding for the arts – you know, things like this and this. In an interview with CNS News, he said that the financial crisis has prevented our dear comrade leader from “doing any new spending.” Huh? WTF? Apparently Baldwin is not familiar with this:

No new spending?

Emmy award-winning actor Alec Baldwin told CNSNews.com on Capitol Hill that he believes the financial crisis has “crippled” President Barack Obama, preventing him from doing any “new spending.” Baldwin also said Obama has been doing “a lot” of “back-peddling” because he’s had to spend his whole first term “trying” to correct America’s course financially.

Following his appearance on Capitol Hill at a press conference with Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.) about campaign finance reform, CNSNews.com asked Baldwin if President Obama has lived up to his expectations.

“Well, I mean, I think so because I think that when you come into office and you want to put your mark on things — this is just my opinion, when you want to put your mark on things, you want to be able to spend. And what’s crippled Obama’s administration, as far as I’m concerned, is the financial crisis and it’s prevented him from doing any new spending,” said Baldwin, who publicly supported Obama in the 2008 Presidential election.

“He’s not able – if the country was as flush as it was under Bill Clinton and he had money — these things cost money — he could have made more of a mark,” said Baldwin. “I think right now he’s had to do a lot of counter-punching; a lot of back peddling. He inherited this crisis from Bush and Paulson. He had to extend the TARP. I think it’s been very difficult for him to spend his whole first term trying to, you know, correct our course financially. I think a second term of Obama, we’ll see a lot more of what we want to see from him.”

As you can see from the graph, Alec, our dear comrade leader has spent mountains of money – most of it borrowed. Yeah, he’s been correcting our course financially all right – dope…

Kyle-Anne Shiver has this great post over at The PJ Tattler about our “hoped-for” dear comrade leader. I’m passing it along in its entirety because it’s short and says it all better than I could.

Well, here’s another Obama first, ladies and gents. Like the Peace Prize awarded on the wings of hope in Obama’s ethereal glow, now various open-government organizations have given the One an award for — hold your breath and count slowly to ten — hoped for “transparency.” A mere week after the most transparent administration in the history of the world was trying to explain why a Biden advance team would confine a lone reporter to a storage room to keep him from mingling with Party fat-cats in Florida, the glorious bastion of open-government moguls decide to preemptively award President Obama with the “transparency” award.

But that’s not the juiciest bit of this. The award was supposed to be given at a public ceremony at the White House with press pool and photographers, but the president decided to cancel all that “transparency” and go with a closed-door, private meeting without a single member of the press in attendance to receive his “transparency” award.

Steve Aftergood, the director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, gave Politico the best quote:

“And in that sense, one could say it resembles the award at the Nobel Peace Prize,” Aftergood said. “It’s not because Obama brought peace to anyone but because people hoped he would be a force for good in the world, and maybe that’s the way to understand this award.”

So, here’s the Obama Standard applied in little Johnny’s world: Darling Johnny, following the example set by the President of the U.S., we’re not going to wait for you to learn your lessons or take your tests before giving you your report card. You look so swell, talk so brightly and sit up so straight and tall at your desk. So, we’re putting all our hope in you and giving you all A’s right this minute in the hope that you’ll be so overjoyed that you’ll actually earn them at some point in the future.

Then, we can apply the Obama Standard to earning salaries and give glowing book reviews before the books are written. Hope is such an amazing thing, isn’t it?

While he could qualify as Moron of the Day just about every day, Venezuelan president for life Hugo Chavez gets a special mention today for this stunning revelation (story here from Reuters). Apparently capitalism wiped out civilization…on Mars!

Capitalism may be to blame for the lack of life on the planet Mars, Venezuela’s socialist President Hugo Chavez said on Tuesday.”I have always said, heard, that it would not be strange that there had been civilization on Mars, but maybe capitalism arrived there, imperialism arrived and finished off the planet,” Chavez said in speech to mark World Water Day.

Chavez, who also holds capitalism responsible for many of the world’s problems, warned that water supplies on Earth were drying up.

Well since NASA is gearing up for a Mars mission, maybe they should consider sending Hugo, Sean Penn, Michael Moore, and the gals from Code Pink for a utopia-building mission. They could take along a pair of unicorns…

Since Alan Grayson (more here and here) was landslided out of the House of Representatives, perennial runner-up Anthony Weiner (D-NY) has taken over the spot of Top Congressional Moonbat. (More on Weiner here, here, and here.) A passionate proponent of obamacare, Weiner could often be found on the House floor equating opponents of the massive government takeover of the health care system to Nazis, child killers, and the like. With the regime handing out over 1000 waivers to the obamacare boot-to-the-face (more here), it seems that Weiner now thinks that NYC would be better off without this hideous legislation he so passionately promoted (story here from the DC). Huh? WTF?

Rep. Anthony Weiner said Wednesday he was looking into how a health law waiver might work for New York City.

Weiner, who is likely to run for mayor of New York, said that because of the city’s special health care infrastructure, his office was looking into alternatives that might make more sense. Weiner is one of the health care law’s biggest supporters; during the debate leading up to reform, he was one of the last holdouts in Congress for the public option.

The congressman was trying to debunk Republican “myths” about the health care law during a speech at the Center for American Progress. He used the waivers as way to describe how flexible the law actually is and how “this notion that the government is shoving the bill down people’s throats” is not true.

“The administration needs to make this argument more forcefully,” he said. “A lot of people who got waivers were … people who are our friends.”

Oh, I see. Obamacare is wonderful for everyone else – just not you and your “friends.” The irony of this is just too delicious.

The 2011 NFL season is in jeopardy because of a dispute between the players & team owners (story here). While there has been strong rhetoric on both sides, none has been as completely vacuous or asinine as this from Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson. Apparently Peterson believes that the team owners treat the players like “modern day slaves.” Huh? WTF?

Vikings running back Adrian Peterson compared NFL owners’ treatment of players to “modern-day slavery,” according to an online interview published Tuesday by Yahoo! Sports.

Yahoo’s Doug Farrar, who conducted the interview Friday with Peterson, removed that comment from the story later Tuesday, explaining on Twitter that he wants to give Peterson the chance to provide context.

“The players are getting robbed. They are,” Peterson told Yahoo. “The owners are making so much money off of us to begin with. I don’t know that I want to quote myself on that.”

When discussing other players feeling the same way, Peterson said: “It’s modern-day slavery, you know? People kind of laugh at that, but there are people working at regular jobs who get treated the same way, too. With all the money. … The owners are trying to get a different percentage, and bring in more money. I understand that; these are business-minded people. Of course this is what they are going to want to do. I understand that; it’s how they got to where they are now. But as players, we have to stand our ground and say, ‘Hey, without us, there’s no football.’ ”

Peterson is set to make $10.72 million in base salary in 2011.

I suppose that what Peterson doesn’t understand is that without the owners, and more important, the fans, he wouldn’t be making almost $11M a year. Especially without a college degree. Peterson attended Oklahoma State University where he majored in basket weavingfootball sociology. He left after his junior year to enter the NFL draft. It does appear, however, that some of his colleagues do understand this simple fact.

Green Bay Packers running back Ryan Grant took exception to Peterson’s comment, writing on Twitter: “Their is unfortunately actually still slavery existing in our world. Literal modern day slavery. That was a very misinformed statement.”

Added Grant: “But I understand what point he was trying to make. I just feel like he should have been advised a little differently.”

Saints fullback Heath Evans said he agrees with most of the Twitter responses about Peterson, which have been mostly negative.

“We are all blessed to even strap a helmet on in this league!” Evans tweeted.

Alas, poor Adrian. I have a suggestion for you. Since no one is forcing you to be a slave to an NFL team, you could always work somewhere else. Can you say, “Do you want fries with that burger?”